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The Arts: The A-Z Of William Blake - `I' Is For The Songs Of Innocence

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20001115
Author:Kevin Jackson

THIS WAS the first complete work of Blake's produced by his personal method of illuminated printing, in which the text and designs were etched on copper in relief, and the prints from these plates then coloured by hand. To judge by the relatively few copies (about 20) known to have survived, it did not enjoy a very wide readership, but posterity has amply compensated by making the complementary volumes of Innocence and Experience familiar to generations of schoolchildren. (An appropriate readership if it is true that Blake wrote some of them when not much more than a child himself.) Adult ...

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